Relatively idle and bittersweet in the pursuit of happiness...

Letting the dog of the leash in the park, I spotted his happiness. Freedom is
that glimmer of short-lived feeling that can't quite be described, but it does feel
good, in the otherwise grim reality of the survival in the U.S. The dog learned
to associate certain words like "come" with the tug of the leash and he readily
responds to them. Clearly, the dog prefers being unleashed. Generally that
offers him with an opportunity to explore the environment deeper than the
reach of a leash. Still, "the system", which in this simple case is represented by
me, retains the unequivocal control over the dog. Societies that tend to keep
their populace constantly on leash, the shorter the better, are never able to
achieve that level of loyalty with that low investment of enforcing energy.
Therefore, I recognize "liberty" not as a civil rights quality, but as a more
advanced tool of social control.

The happiness, nevertheless, is a more complex achievement. Freedom is just
one of the pre-requisites. Therefore nobody can guarantee to a dog that he will
actually achieve happiness when off the leash. He might as well hurt himself
somehow and feel very miserable afterwards. The failure is a part of the
pursuit. In fact, the failure is so much more widespread than the success, as a
consequence of the pursuit, that it became recognized as a marketable lifestyle
choice, and thus socially acceptable. It actually became a success story of its
own through the non-judgmental nineties with colleges that do not flunk well
pierced Gen X students, and the entire grunge iconography, the underlying
skate-punk culture that MTV and ESPN2 brought to the mainstream, and,
ultimately, the versatility of offered lines of pricey snowboard clothing and
accessories through the companies with names like Failure, Ltd.

Bittersweet is the name of the only more advanced trail in Killington, VT, that
I was able to ride without majorly wrecking myself the first season I picked up
snowboarding. That was winter 96/97. The following season I already worked part-time as
snowboarding instructor in Poconos. Now, this simply wouldn't be possible
anywhere in the Old World, where I'd probably be laughed off. Also, this
wouldn't work with skiing, with its established rules and procedures: people
who take skiing lessons spend weeks walking on the skis in the bottom of the
hill. Aspiring snowboarders are taken to the top of the bunny hill in their first
lesson. And some of the instructors never took a lesson themselves, since no
lessons were available at the time when they learned it. No snowboards were
available either: they would take the wheels off their skateboards and strap
their feet, wearing ordinary work-boots, to the board with torn car seat-belts
and ride the halfpipes they'd build at the mall parking lots.

Of course, those times are far behind us. Primarily because nobody can build a
halfpipe in the parking lot anymore. Stratton's advertisement is misguiding
when it claims that they have nothing to worry about El Nino because they
have the largest snowmaking operation in the world (the claim that many East
Coast ski resorts claim for themselves). Snowmaking, however, depends on the
cold weather. Snow can't be made if the temperature is not near or below
freezing. Warm weather with RAIN (a four letter word in the ski-resort parlance) is a plague for any ski/ride place,
regardless of snowmaking, i.e. El Nino screwed us up pretty well. It is very
telling that the biggest departures of temperatures above the season's average
happened in the most and the longest industrialized areas of the planet:
Europe, U.S. Northeast and Japan-Korea-Taiwan triangle. The El Nino
affected area of the Pacific is getting bigger every year. It is still quite far from
the polar caps, so maybe we do have time to reverse the effect, but now, I
believe, it should be plain to everyone that this is a man-made El Nino and that the carbon dioxide and other
"greenhouse" gasses emissions should be seriously reduced.

We have detailed satellite imaging of the El Nino, yet we are in no knowledge
whether the global warming exists either as a cause or as an effect of the El
Nino. Existence of the precise knowledge, which was a pride of industrial
society's humans, presumes that there is a truth. Truth is a precious
possession. So, therefore its knowledge is the privilege of the few. In a "don't
ask, don't tell" society the institution of knowledge was replaced by the
institution of information. Information is public property. It tells you
everything, except that it does not answers your fundamental question: true or
false. Truth is the concept of the past. We have many information about
killings of O.J. Simpson's wife and her lover, yet we have no precise
knowledge if O.J. did it. We have many information about the TWA crash, yet
we have no precise knowledge of what actually happened. We have painfully
many information available about the Presidents of the U.S. sex life, yet we
have no precise knowledge of did Monica sucked his dick off or not. Smoking
without inhaling reveals the legally substantial information about smoking
while leaving us fantasizing about the "baked" Clinton, and inhaling without
smoking, whereas providing us with detailed information about the THC
content in the blood, makes the truth about Rebagliatti's smoking irrelevant. Concealing
information and thus transcending it into knowledge, was the greatest mistake
of the so-called communist regimes. Contrary, the enormity of available
information in so-called open societies rendered knowledge un-sought and the
truth un-cared for. The ostrich perspective of non-voting voters became a rule,
not an exception. Do we then have to obey the laws? Or is it just a matter of
preference? Will the system have the desire and energy to go after each and
every offender? Or is this a question of budget (like in the THX 1138 movie)?

Yet, the interests of the politics (following the same ostrich perspective of the willing electorate) lay obviously outside of the framework of
apathy and legal gridlock that slowly chokes the free world empire: they deal
with foreign markets and so-called rogue states, anticipating the terrorism from
outside as the more serious, or at least more immediate threat, than the slow
structural decay on the inside. Certainly, the reason for this preference may be
in the better equippedness to deal with such problems. Once it became
apparent to all nuclear powers that victory in a nuclear war is not feasible, the
one with the strongest non-nuclear armed forces became the ultimate world
power. The U.S. with its ability to eavesdrop on any communication around
the world, with its detailed 3D maps of any territory on the planet, with its
stealth aircraft that can penetrate undetected deep into any country in the world
and deliver their fire-and-forget smart bombs that will guide themselves
precisely to the target using the global-positioning system devices, is clearly
superior to any other military in the world. Of course, a nuclear attack would
devastate the U.S., but the U.S. is ready to make peace with nuclear powers,
even if it means overlooking the human rights abuses like in the case of China,
or military operations against civilians like the Russian one in Chechenya.
Actually the U.S. is heading the loose convention of privileged countries:
nuclear powers and economic giants - which all now share the same interest:
retaining their economic upper-hand, or retaining their privileged status as the
holders of the nuclear weapons (the only vaguely enforced condition being non-proliferation of
nuclear technology). The only real threat that still exists to their (new world)
order is of a terrorist nuclear or bio-chem-weapon attack, which may originate
from some "rogue state" that was left to starve on the margins of the planetary
economy. But, in this increasingly post-national-state world, the attack (or instead of a planned attack the disaster may visit upon us as a consequence to our enevironmental carelesness) may originate from a disgruntled subculture group inside the so-called first world: Timothy McWeigh pulled off more succesfull terrorist action than ANY foreigner on American soil ever. Larry Wayne Harris was just arrested in Nevada on charges that he wanted to plant anthrax microbes in New York subway system. How sweet. The story goes that he wanted to have Iraq blamed for that later. And charges won't stick: what did they find? Unopened package of anthrax vials that he received legally from a U.S. government approved facility (the same way how Saddam Hussein received them) and the publicly available map of New York subway. That's way circumstantial, come on.

Is it possible that this guys
who were catched by FBI in Nevada for possession of anthrax, and later
it was discovered that it was some inoccuous vaccine, pulled a prank on
the government and the ECHELON system - like what if they exchanged a
message that contained both "subway" and "anthrax" with some right-wing
militia type of e-mail address that feds are monitoring as a possible
terrorist entity (while ordering a vaccine from an appropriate
government lab that also holds anthrax) - and to a double benefit to the
humankind making it plain that the U.S. possesses anthrax, too (which,
too, is more than a subtle message to Saddam......)? Over 600,000 children under age of 5 died in Iraq, mostly as a consequence of
the economic sanctions. Yet many of the actual contracts under UN Resolution
986 for supplies such as powdered milk were delayed or vetoed by the US
representative to the sanctions committee. The incidence of leukemia among
children in Iraq raised from 10-20 a month to 20-30 a week, which could be
related to the 350 tons of depleted uranium the U.S. used to blow up Iraqi
tanks in the Gulf War (the data from Kosovo are not in yet). Obviously, Iraqis may have a legitimate desire to throw
some anthrax in the New York water supply. It might be that their leader is a
sick megalomaniac who'd sacrifice kindergarten children to protect his toys of
mass-destruction, but this might not be so plainly obvious to Iraqi citizens. In a
very post-modern way, American foreign policy displayed enormous
reluctance to use power, while still firmly asserting its readiness to use it if
necessary. With no hesitation State Department let Arab nations criticize Israel
policies that blocked the American sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace process,
thus gaining important support for punishing Iraq. Then, a Russian envoy was
sent to reason with Saddam, while in British parliament a carrot was suddenly
dangled in front of Iraqis: if they go along with the Security Council requests
the world with let them sell more of their oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. stepped up
the relations with Iran, who suffered greatly in the 8 year war with Iraq, and
would perhaps enjoy dominating its suddenly weakened neighbor. Very
American, the U.S. precisely outlined its plane for attack (after all, who can
stop invisible planes and bombs that fall on previously programed
coordinates?), and let Kofi Anan explain to Saddam that he had the option of
destroying the sites himself, without "collateral damage" (meaning dead
civilians), or face the bombing, in which some "collateral damage" was
inevitable, but since he was properly notified, that "collateral damage" would be
his responsibility.

The entire war operation is reduced to a police action, nearly like the eviction
procedure: you get City Marshalls 3 days notice and you can go to court filing
the order to show cause or abandon the apartment. You can even check with
the Marshall's office when they are going to come to evict you: like let's say
Thursday after 2 pm. Because you are entirely unable to offer any resistance.
Iraq has no means of defending itself against the cruise missiles and stealth
bombers attack. He can sacrifice his people as a public relations stunt to
present Americans as child murderers, but since now everybody expects him to
do it, it might harm his popularity more than Americans. This situation offers a
scary perspective in which I am less afraid of some "rogue state" sponsored
terrorists driving the knife deep into the belly of the infidel, as I am of a nearly
complete helplessness of have-not states against the whims of internal political
interests of the powerful. The U.S. military is becoming the police force of the
post-industrial rich world. In Sarajevo, where despite the existence of local
currency, the vendors still prefer payments in deutschmarks or dollars,
orphaned kids beg in the streets amongst the newly opened Versace boutiques
and the buildings are half inhabited and half burned or ruined while the citizens slowly adopted the new dress rules: scarfs for the women, beards for the men - the American
visitors are welcomed in the manner the Roman citizens were in some far flung
province of the empire or as Austrians were accepted as a matter of fact in the
last century, or as Ottomans were centuries before. And in New York, Bosnian asylum seekers get to tell their stories of having been riflebutt-kicked trying to prevent the rape of their wives and daughters. One guy was just recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in a New York hospital: a consequence of repeated beatings with chains in Manjaca, that ground his spinal cord nerves. I just wonder how many "silent neighbors" from Republika Srpska are already here, among us.

Yet, on the inside the over saturation with information, produced the
resentment of judgement, apathy and ignorance. Only after angry protests of
some foreign governments did the American based NGO community requested
that the State Department, which issues an annual report on the state of human
rights in every country in the world, except for the U.S., has to come up with
an honest and detailed report on the state of human rights here in the U.S. as
well. Sometimes I have an impression that people live in some sort of
vegetative state, surviving but not exactly being alive. To the most extreme of
course will be the example of the life of my American born roommate: sedated
by alcohol or marijuana most of the day he spends absorbing information from
the TV and newspapers or books, yet completely oblivious to the meaning,
interrupting his state of being only for the crude life's necessities like preparing
food, going to the bathroom or, often, falling asleep. The responsibilities like
walking the dog, dating his girlfriend or, rarely, having a job, consummate his
life energy so completely, that he usually have to rest for three days after
having worked one - the most pathetic being watching him look so important (and adding to that the fast paced walk through the apartment, as if in hurry) when he anounces the completion of the simplest task like taking out the garbage. The seriousness with which he explains his day is nearly
absurd: like if somebody tells you, in an answer to your question on what did
he do that morning, completely composed, that his back itched and that he had
to scratch it. In such constellation the doing of the actual jobs that make this
society survives the day is generally left to immigrants, which is obvious to
anybody who spends in New York more than a few days.

The land of opportunity, also generates hopelessness by withholding that
opportunity from majority of people, just by a virtue of their maybe mistaken
conviction that they do not have the right stuff. An American teacher in the
1960s gave her students a course in racism by targeting specific groups for
a week each - the first week blue-eyed children were "racially inferior", the
second week brown-eyed
and so on. The result was that as each group was targeted its members became
bedraggled and their
grades fell. Then when they were the Master Race, their grades soared and
they became healthy and
happy. The courses were eventually taken up in schools across America, or so
I was told. Apparently, the opportunity is very frail category. The sentence that
Toni Morrison so finely made public in her book Paradise: COME
PREPARED OR DO NOT COME AT ALL, which was an actual message to
the pilgrims who were contemplating going West. It is not spoken in the times of
politically correct politesse, yet it is still very actual. It is the nature of
opportunity to be sought after yet never really attained. Those who are not
prepared for that, suffer. But those who suffer, ultimately may achieve.
Although, why would anybody want to pay the price? Eventually, the society
may reach "nirvana" through achieving particularly nothing. In the absence of
new frontiers, there are substitutes, which are individually fun, although
generally of no historic importance (e.g. snowboarding, sky-diving, virtual
reality games, etc.). Hence Kennedys of today die in ski incidents or of a drug
overdose or in private plane crashes, while their progenitors were shot dead for defending some political
ideas larger than life. If we are to live in a pre-determined state of society,
where each mode of communication may be transparent to the entities of social
control, then why would we care about anything anymore? It is sufficient to
get by and try to squeeze as much "fun" as possible from otherwise dead-bound existence. Why would immigrants, who are often, particularly under the new INS regulations, held guilty until proven innocent, just for coming here, behave any different?